Ivan Grubanov’s installation »Visitor« (Rijksakademie, 2003) is a double slide projection. On one wall there is a series of photographed drawings, while on the wall opposite there are photo sequences taken from TV. Both sets of images show a courtroom, judges and journalists in close-ups . The work is a »media collapse« of Slobodan Milosevic’s trial in The Hague, known as Case IT-02-54 of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY); it shows what television saw and what the artist has depicted in the courtroom at the same time. In most cases, the television depictions and the drawings resemble each other, but they do not operate on the same level.
In some European courts, it is forbidden to sketch. For example, in Britain it was banned by an Act of Parliament dating back to 1925. In most courts today, taking photographs is forbidden as well. However, television is granted access. In The Hague, the situation was similar. However, the artist was issued with a »Visitor's Card« and, during a two-year period, he was able to enter the courtroom and make sketches, even though this was actually not allowed by the permit he had . Serbian TV recorded footage that often showed him. This was his »five minutes of fame«, as Gerardo Mosquera has called it, and a postcard to his family, too.
There is obviously a legal hierarchy for media reporting in a courtroom, which can be differentiated as follows: silent or disturbing, hidden or distressing, observing or interventional. All of this distinguishes drawing from television, but also photography from television. Of course, there is also the difference in the treatment (»all-at-once«, »get-rid-of-it«) meted out to the »seventh force«, as journalism is called, by other political forces present.

Another difference, also interesting if you are familiar with the structures of journalism, concerns the way censorship works in each case. Content-controlling systems work far better and more thoroughly with television than they do with the press. In a way, television has more of a diffuse »collective responsibility«, as a single report passes through several hands. This can be seen clearly, for instance, when a false report leads to the firing of a number of people. Furthermore, as has been proven many times, the asynchronicity of text and image in newspapers can bring to the fore hidden references, enable double readings and leave more space for the standpoint of a writer. It can be re-read, while the TV image simply disappears. An article is a document per se, while TV news is seen as primarily documenting.

It may sound ridiculous that, in court, drawings are treated similarly to photography in that a permit is needed to make them, while none is needed for taking notes. Drawings do not create any disturbance, but it may still cause distress to people to be caught in a pose. Is it because of this posing? One more thing a drawing does is to »privatize«, make things subjective. Television needs to wait to catch special moments, and a photographer has to search for a precise moment, taking into account light, distance or other variables. But a caricature simply records a person. A text can do the same, but you can cut a text, while you cannot cut a drawing in order to remove parts of it. Television reports and texts are more prone to step-by-step censoring, cutting and editing .

In boring American courtroom dramas, the presence of an artist is usually meant to signify media interest, though this seems to be a rather perverse hobby. But what do these images have in common with Grubanov’s drawings? One of these court artists, Thom Winterburn, has also made a drawing of Milosevic on trial. We can compare the two .

Grubanov’s drawing is sketchy and soft, and includes a text inside the drawing itself. It depicts Milosevic the way he was behaving in court – proud, arrogant, »self-important« and pompous. His pose is represented by a simple caricature-like gesture, his chin pushed forward, almost like a Neanderthal figure, but still familiar. Winterburn’s drawing, in comparison, is concentrated on the bold head and messy hair as recognizable characteristics, while the face itself is not shown in detail. It depicts the same face from a completely different angle, in foreshortened perspective; the head is bowed, hiding in shame or perhaps just listening. It could be anyone. Only the description, itself a quote and added in the picture file, says Milosevic looked »smug« and »defiant«, which he does not in the drawing itself.

The text in each drawing also plays a different role. Grubanov’s text depicts a capricious moment in the original, untranslated Serbian or English, a quote from the moment of the speech that he has just heard, following the general gesture of the ex-president. Winterburn's drawing from »Crimes of War« has an added description, and the whole text reads as a caption. The drawing is an illustration of the text, in a similar manner to the way photography is used in journalism, as Roland Barthes has elaborated. However, here it serves the purpose of a pseudo-document, of pseudo-photography. Contrary to Grubanov’s insistence on the media aspect, namely by using paper sheets ripped from a pad, Winterburn's drawing does not uncover its own medium. It is overly elaborate and looks as if it was not produced in the courtroom at all; or if it was, it seems to have been worked up later on, suffering by the addition of too much detail covering the entire area. It is not just a sketch, and, placed in the article, becomes a pseudo-photograph.

This drawing obviously makes use of the iconic appearance of comparable images in the media to create a reference to reality, as if it were a document. Grubanov’s sketch, on the other hand, shows a familiarity with the form, as if he had drawn this face many times, as if he could do it blindly. The artist writes in his unpublished diary: »I had big problems drawing his face, I had seen so many representations of it; to me, he represented a system of lines more than a character.« Grubanov notes that, in some of the drawings, he looks a little bit like Tito or Karadjic. This familiarity may also be the reason that the figure is positioned as if it were in a more natural environment, not in court, but as if giving a speech. Milosevic seems to be a president still, perhaps holding a press conference, and sometimes appears like a statue, writes Grubanov. Sometimes only a detail, such as a wig, reveals the fact that we are in court.

While Winterburn’s drawing looks like a photograph and also plays that role in the newspaper article, Grubanov’s use of text reminds one more of a cartoon. Its satirical nature recalls the court drawings that started the whole genre. Satirical court images have a long history – a history that remains a curiosity within general art history owing to its popularity and low commercial value, but of interest, for that very reason, in the field of cultural analysis, especially narratology . They are part of the emergence of popular culture, namely that of the comic.

It is only in the wider perspective of cultural analysis that we can recognize the point of this connection, its political and social connotations. Museums began to make art a part of popular culture long ago, and started to produce an enormous quantity of manuals, introductions, and short histories for »dummies«. There is hardly any similar general introduction at all for comic culture, but there are comics. The reason is, of course, that while art institutions are participating curiously in a global market - »cultural tourism«, so to speak - comics are locally produced and remain unrepresented . Comics are read in national languages, and it is hard to find a translation of some of the masterpieces even in the »lingua franca« of English. The French have their own comics, the Croats too – and they all have their respective schools. Speaking in terms of art history, the territory of comics almost appears like that of Renaissance political cartography, unconnected and deeply anchored within local narratives. Sometimes they do enter the cultural industry through movie representations, but this happens more rarely than with literature. Comic culture seems to be almost elitist, still being a kind of »toilet literature«; but in terms of its childish resistance, it was, for instance, fully recognized by the Situationisme Internationale .

Comic strips have been part of a counter-culture since Honoré Daumier, who was put in jail for his satirical approach in »Gargantua« (1831). Contrary to American super-hero tales for children, European and Asian comic series are more orientated towards adult readers, especially in their black humor, with erotic comics and other weird variants. One of them is the blackly humorous »Alan Ford«, originally made by Bunker and Magnus, containing a radical left cynical interpretation of the US model of capitalism . Contrary to US models of the super-hero story, Ford represents the total collapse of heroism, the blackest possible humor, otherwise reserved for underground comix maniacs. However, in ex-Yugoslavia it was part of wider popular culture, and sentences like »Halo Bing Kako brat? Opet u zatvoru?« (Hello Bing! How is your brother? In prison again?« have become a part of mainstream culture.

But it is not only the association with prison, but also Grubanov’s style of drawing in general, that brings to mind this comic. Milosevic's figure actually resembles the figure of the Chief, merged with the hairstyle of No1 . The boss that doesn’t work, an invalid and mythomaniac?

In the amazing diary of the artist, which follows his ex-president on trial for two years and contains a total of 200 sketches accompanied by notes, we find the story of deception told once again. The same ideas of corruption in politics, clumsy secret services, and idiotic neo-Nazi ideas about the »rotten West« that are present in the Ford comics surface here as well.

The way it does not present a conventional story-line, instead chronologically indicating the narrative of a historical courtroom drama, makes this series more like a graphic serial, a succession of similar objects without a forecasted ending; like a painter’s cycle as a group of works in a limited edition, or new media’s reduction of similarity to redundancy of information. Between the logical start and the logical end, they pursue the differences of the always-similar visual set-up of a courtroom.

After a whole decade of politically aware art from ex-Yugoslavia, including many pathetic works depicting identity that Suvakovic has compared to social realism, Grubanov's work is intriguing for the way it generalizes the concepts of series, cycle and redundancy of information. Besides, it takes a risky, nasty and ironic approach to the whole process it depicts. It has revived the medium, its forgotten politicalness, the way maps and cards are seen – as satirical drawings and comics.

Resources:
Grubanov, Ivan: http://www.cyberrex.org/grubanov
Mosquera, Gerardo: Self-Portrait with Milosevic, unpublished

 

 

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